


you're gone (it's alright, i'm still here)

by ravenraiyes



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, Angst, Angst and Humor, Biological Warfare, F/F, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-02-21
Updated: 2015-02-21
Packaged: 2018-03-14 08:37:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,667
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3404120
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ravenraiyes/pseuds/ravenraiyes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>they're in a middle of a war, and all bellamy manages to do is get himself into near-death situations</p>
            </blockquote>





	you're gone (it's alright, i'm still here)

**Author's Note:**

> or, the three times bellamy avoided death, and the one time he didn't have to.

**THE FIRST TIME** it happens, Bellamy thinks he’s one lucky son of a bitch.

He’s not paying attention, funnily enough, which is pretty ironic considering that it’s something he’s emphasized ever since this damn war’s begun.

Rain is pouring down in streams like the clear aqua waterfalls he used to spend his time swimming in back at home - before everything went to complete utter shit - and every second rain splatters on top the windshield of his car, leaving him essentially blind in their wake. Every drop pounds angrily on the glass, and if he lets his imagination loose far enough, he can feel each individual one leave their mark on top his skull, ringing loudly in his brain.

Bellamy can’t focus.

It’s like he’s having this out of body experience, where he sort of knows what’s happening but not really because he has a vague sense of what he’s doing. His head is buzzing in light of recent events, and it’s refusing to process what’s occurring as of right now; something Bellamy needs desperately to transpire because he has to stay alive.

If he fails to do so – if he doesn’t stick around, doesn’t manage to scrape by through the skin of his teeth, doesn’t manage to survive - then who will be left to take care of Octavia?

(He already knows the answer to that - it’s no one.)

He can, however, slightly, consciously, feel his movements and is aware of his thoughts, but it’s like he’s fucking numb. And on top of that, he can’t see a damn thing because of this giant storm.

Bellamy doesn’t stop driving though. The hum of his rusty old Chevy keeps him company and keeps him tethered to reality; the cranky rumble of the engine tugs at his senses and jolts his body occasionally from time to time as miles upon miles of road fly on by. Blacks, grays and the occasional flashes of green pull at his peripheral vision as he streaks past, but he barely pays any mind. He’s beginning to lose feeling in his ass, surely a result of being behind the wheel for god knows how long.

He knows he should probably stop, should probably pull over and wait it out - what’s the point of driving when he can’t see? - but like the hardheaded ass he is, Bellamy forges on. His foot never leaves the gas pedal.

He needs to get away. To get out. Away from this godforsaken town. He doesn’t really care for the specifics, doesn’t have a certain destination in mind (which is dangerous, since they’re in the middle of a fucking  _war_  of all things, but he can’t be bothered to care right now).

Bellamy just needs to get away.

Away from the place that he’s called home for twenty five years (and Octavia eighteen of those twenty five); away from the place where he’s loved and learned to love; away from the last place where he’d seen his mother alive and healthy.

Away from the only place he’s ever seen his mother alive and healthy.

Fighting back a fresh onslaught of tears - tears that Bellamy doesn’t really need right now - he clenches his jaw, gripping the leather wheel harder just to feel a sensation other than the plain  _sorrow_  and  _hurt_  that seem to encompass his entire being right now. Grinding his teeth, he feels the all too familiar burning sensation behind his eyes, begging to be released, to roll down his cheeks and to paint his face like a canvas, but he refuses to cry. Refuses to let a single drop fall out of his eyes, unlike the millions raining down up his car, which descend down like there’s no tomorrow.

And however much he wants to just break down and sob and just let it all out, he doesn’t let himself do it.

Because that, to him, means admitting that Aurora Blake was gone forever.

And she wasn’t.

At least in his heart and his mind, she wasn’t.

So with tears clouding his vision and crowding his throat - he’s fucking  _suffocating_  - he floors the gas pedal and continues on his merry way, enjoying the acrid smell of burnt rubber upon asphalt as he speeds on.

Octavia snores lightly in the backseat as he drives, a welcome distraction from the dreadfully painful trips down memory lane. He halfheartedly grins as another slight snore breaks the silence and ambles around in the small space of his truck.

Bellamy remembers simpler times, when there hadn’t been a war to fight in and a deadly sickness that came along with it. He remembers times when all he had to worry about was whether or not he had to take out the garbage (it usually was his turn, but he’d always make Octavia do it), or argue with Octavia about her sleeping habits and tendency to snore.

She claimed she, a lady, could not be capable of such atrocious acts.

The next day, he’d recorded her sleeping, and to her mortification - and his amusement ( _“ha, i fucking told you you snore like a pig, Octavia”_ ) - she snored like a rhino on a rampage.

He remembers when he’d first heard of the war.

Remembers how it was scary, slippery slope full of sharp twists and turns because it wasn’t something the United States was accustomed to. Instead of being met with guns and cold steel and faceless soldiers on the battlefield, they were faced with horribly crippling, fast working, contagious diseases.

A cowardly way to fight, sure, but it got the job done.

And the United States had no fucking  _idea_  how to fight that.

Biological warfare, they’d called it. Germany had gone up and engineered a fatal disease that moved through its victims easily and left them dead within several days, wiping out tens of hundreds at a time, thanks to it’s initial flu-like symptoms, allowing for easy contamination when others came in contact with the infected.

 _'It appears to be some sort of deadly strain of anthrax,'_  Caroline Sunnyvale, the rather plain looking anchorwoman for Channel 2, had smiled prettily at the camera, as if it was something to be happy about, as if it was as normal as discussing the usual town parades and events.

 _'Don't panic, folks.'_  Her smile had turned into somewhat of a grimace during the statement, all pearly whites but no feeling behind them - more of a baring of teeth than anything else - like she herself didn’t believe it. _'Scientists are already working on finding a possible cure.'_

He remembers scoffing at the television, the complete and utter disbelief creeping into his system as she’d continued, yammering on and on about  _not panicking_  and feeding the lies of _it will surely be fine_ s to the viewers at home.

He hadn’t believed a single word she’d said. The pessimist within himself had cruelly remarked that scientists had been working on finding cures for many things for many years without any of them bearing tangible results.

He supposes his mother contracting that very same disease a couple of weeks later is his retribution.

(How’s that saying go again? Oh yeah - karma is a bitch.)

He remembers the beginning of the end; how his mother had called him with a quaking voice than unmistakably was raw from crying moments before. How she had brokenly whispered  _i’m so sorry_ s and  _i love you_ s into his ear while his whole entire universe crumbled underneath him.

He remembers sagging underneath the weight of it all, remembers the crushing defeat pressing down on his shoulders insistently as she whispered her love to him, begging for him to take care of his sister.

"There was this sick, sick, man, Bell. He didn’t know any better. He didn’t know what he was doing." She’d whispered sadly, as if her words could somehow make everything seem like it was going to be okay.

It wasn’t.

At that moment, he’d hated his mother. For willingly working at the hospital when she fucking _knew_ there was a fatal epidemic on the rise, of which there was no cure. For willingly putting her life on the line to ease the lives of others.

He didn’t care at that moment.

Because Bellamy Blake was, and still  _is_ , selfish, selfish man.

He wanted more time with his mother.

_Too bad he didn’t get it._

And all of a sudden, the tears are back, insistent in tugging against his eyes, only this time it’s different; this time, they’re in full force and it takes something wet dripping onto his lap to realize that he’s crying. It takes his hand wiping at cheeks to confirm the fact that he’s crying, and suddenly his already suspicious coughs are turning into something more like sobs and god fucking  _damn_ it.

Bellamy’s crying - the choked, quiet kind of silent suffering - but he doesn’t want to feel things, doesn’t want to let emotion take over, so he does the only thing his stupid self can think of.

He continues driving.

And he’s doing fine.

(At least, that’s what he keeps telling himself.)

+++

The tears stop around an hour later, after he nearly careens off the highway with all of the emotions buzzing about in his head, taking a moment to breath and tell himself to calm the fuck down before he gets himself and O killed.

It works, needless to say.

The rain hasn’t stopped at all since he’s started driving, and if possible, he swears that it starts to rain harder as soon as he makes it out of Ark City, Virginia. O would tell him to stop, to take a rest - he’s pretty sure he’s been stuck in the driver’s seat for nearly six hours now - that the rain is some kind of omen to stop or something equally pretentious.

He isn’t O, though, so he keeps on driving, even though it’s getting harder to see and he thinks those lumpy shadows on the side of the road could be trees but he’s actually not sure at this point until one of those shadows start moving towards the road a bit and his tired brain goes,  _"holy fuck trees can move?"_

He’s been sitting in this car for too damn long.

Of course, he doesn’t realize that the moving lumps are actual human beings until his car gets close enough so that his headlights illuminate a curvy blond girl standing fiercely in the pouring rain in the middle of road, arms crossed and a grumpy expression to match.

On purpose.

And then, of course, because his brain is slow as fuck, two things happen at once.

One: he thinks, somewhere in the back of his brain as all of this is happening, that she’s one crazy lady.

Two: he doesn’t register it until the last possible minute, which means he’s forced to send the car swerving onto the other lane to barely avoid hitting her with his car.

Breathing heavily, he glances at her silhouette in the pouring rain in the rear view mirror, foot off the gas pedal for once as he contemplates how exactly close he was to killing somebody today.

He’s tempted to just gun the gas and hightail it out of there, to shake all of his doubts and fears and thoughts of _god, i almost died too_ s, but he realizes that the blond girl is marching up to the door of his truck with an angry expression on her face like it’s _his_  fault she nearly died.

When she gets closer and closer, he can make out some details about her face and her faint outline, even though the rain is seriously impairing his judgement. Bellamy guesses that she’s about O’s age, judging by the innocent but prissy air she carries, pert nose sticking up in the air, as if the whole damn world owed her something.

What a  _princess_.

She knocks on the glass, loud and confident, and the only thing preventing him from just bolting is the minor fact that he feels a bit sorry about almost running her over, so he rolls down the window a teensy bit.

"Yes, princess?" His throat is still raw from bawling his heart out mere hours before, so it comes off a little raspier and less intimidating than he’d like it to.

"Me and my friends need a ride to Camp Jaha. Rumor has it they’re building a safe haven. I want to get there." She tilts her head daringly at Bellamy, as if he should automatically bow down to her and grant her wishes.

He scoffs, “Oh yeah? And pray tell, why would I want do that, princess?”

"You wouldn’t want the lives of innocent people on your hands," she answers simply, lifting up her nose again, like she already knows that she’s broken him down and placed him into boxes that label who he is, like she’s some kind of damn psychoanalyst.

"How the hell do you know that?" He frowns at the blond girl, dirt splattering her features and her hair as rain pounds down upon her, unrelenting and angrily.

She peers at him with the clearest blue eyes he’s ever seen ( _like the waterfalls back at home_ , he thinks absentmindedly) and answers with nonchalance, “You didn’t run me over.”

"And," he frowns, already feeling the giant complex coming on, the crease in his forehead becoming even more prominent with each word in this conversation with this stupidly arrogant girl, "what if I turn out to be a rapist?"

She points at the picture of O taped to the dash, and grins, “You’re not.”

He sighs.

The girl positively beams, her yellow hair flying about and lighting up her face.

"Great! I’ll go get my friends."

+++

And that’s how, several minutes later, he has to explain to O that they have hitchhikers.

She’s not even miffed of course, because they’re all around her age and she’s never met a lot of people her age, being from a town with a population of mainly the elderly. Instead, she’s ecstatic as hell and suddenly his roomy truck is beginning to look a whole lot smaller with the addition of four new passengers.

"You’re really pretty," one of the boys smile goofily - the one he taken to calling Goggles because of the ridiculously antiquated headgear he has propped up on top of his head - in the backseat at Octavia and he can tell she’s totally blushing as a result of the high pitched response she feeds him.

He has half a mind to turn around and give Goggles a big brother  _'if you hurt her, i hurt you”_  talk with the accompanying punch, but before he can, the girl -  _Clarke_ , he begrudgingly acknowledges in his mind - interrupts him from the passenger seat.

"Keep your eyes on the road, Grumpy. You don’t want to run over any other civilians," she teases, eyes creasing into a smile, and his fingers wrap even tighter around the wheel.

She’s already living up to her moniker of ‘Princess’, ordering him around like he has nothing better to do with his time than serve her and do her bidding -which he does, because he actually values his life, thank you very much.

But however he wants to argue, everything she says, is, unfortunately, right.

Which ticks him off, because it happens like ninety-nine percent of the time, and it’s only adding to the huge complex that he’s getting thanks to the fact she’s always right and how she always seems to have the interest of their little ragtag group in mind instead of her own personal ones.

It frustrates him to no end, how she’s so selfless and he’s everything but.

Gritting his teeth, he turns his attention back onto the road and repeats to himself,  _"Just one week, Bell. One week and you’re free."_

He should’ve just run her over. Vehicle manslaughter he can deal with - managing a car full of six hormonal teenagers, and one prissy princess to rule them all, not so much.

**Author's Note:**

> liked it? no? please leave comments & thoughts :) 
> 
> also posted on my tumblr ( http://ravenraiyes.tumblr.com/ ) feel free to approach me there! :)


End file.
